Changes of movement patterns and hurdle performance following traditional and differencial hurdle training

Introduction To improve technical skills in sports it is often recommended to repeat the same movement over and over again. Such learning strategies assume implicitly that generalized prototypes exist and that these prototypes can be achieved by copying many times. Strong indications for the individuality of movement behaviour (Schöllhorn 1999) and a low probability for the repetition of two identical movements (Hatze 1986) lead to question these assumptions. Based on the coordination dynamics approach the concept of differencial learning tries to utilize the fluctuations in human motor behaviour to induce a self organising process to the athlete which takes advantage of individual movement and learning characteristics (Schöllhorn 2000). Therefore, the athlete is confronted during the acquisation phase with a variety of exercises which extend the whole range of possible solutions for a specific situation or task. Besides, adaptational processes are rather caused by the differences between the exercises than by the numbers of repetitions. Evaluating the differential approach in sprinting (Schöllhorn et al. 2001), several exercises had been used that coincide in kinematics and dynamics with selected details of the complete movement. In this study these characteristics were applied on the hurdle sprint which requires a higher level on technical skills. The pupose was to investigate effects of differencial learning on hurdel sprint technique as well as on hurdle performance.